But from what I read- they arent stealing that loaf of bread. Some reasonable argument can be held that stealing food to feed your family is not immoral. But stealing because you think “big corporations” are evil is immoral, unethical and illegal.
They are wrong.
The people in the article arent stealing for food.
Besides, in America, in many regions, food aid is common. I worked with the homeless, and food wasnt a big concern (at least in that county). If was shelter, medical care, and getting whichever drug they used to get by- booze, nicotine or illegal drugs.
And what is critical- people in “food deserts” arent suffering from starvation, - they arent getting healthy food. Fruit, Veggies, etc.
Food deserts — sometimes called grocery deserts — aren’t barren wastelands. But they lack something essential: reliable access to healthy food that’s also affordable.
I wouldn’t defend “microlooting” as a sensible political strategy or coherent moral frame. But I would defend one of the underlying premises that the podcast discussion seemed designed to raise: Both our legal system and our moral intuitions are unfair and asymmetric when it comes to the treatment of wage theft and shoplifting.
Companies are basically never criminally prosecuted for wage theft, even though civil enforcement mechanisms often establish beyond any serious dispute that the company knowingly underpaid employees. And wage theft happens on a scale that utterly dwarfs all other forms of theft. We’re talking billions annually. Yet it is not treated as a moral scandal and gets almost no public attention. By contrast, the barest uptick in shoplifting–small enough that there is real statistical dispute about whether it actually exists–is treated in many circles as a civilizational crisis. Even in the most progressive cities in the US, it is still a crime for which people are daily arrested and jailed. The two forms of unlawful taking are not perfect equivalents, but their differences do not explain the complete divergence in how we treat them as a society.
Challenges to this asymmetry in how we treat the high and the low are a good thing. Secretly swiping cookies to fight the man isn’t a serious political act. But, of course, talking about microlooting isn’t actually the same as doing it. Maybe Tolentino, Piker, and company are fighting a battle in the Meme War of Attention that isn’t best analyzed in traditional terms that take it all at face value. If the podcast succeeded in getting millions of people to talk about wage theft asymmetry this week, that could be a longer-lasting effect than any blowback from people taking the suggestion seriously. I don’t know. I feel like everything that happens in 2026 requires me to go back and re-read Baudrillard.
This kind of “thinking” is foolish and dangerous. There are always people who figure that the best plan is to destroy the current system and then assume that a new better system will somehow spontaneously arise to replace it.
History shows that this is stupid. When you destroy the current flawed system what usually replaces it is something worse.
The only way you’ll get a better system is to plan it out first and then carefully install the new better system as you carefully dismantle the old existing system.
So if these people want a better food distribution network, they should be figuring out how to produce food, refine it, transport it, and distribute it to the consumers on a sustainable basis. Then when they’ve got that system up and running, they can start shutting down corporate supermarkets.
Food doesn’t just appear by magic. Have they figured out who’s going to produce and distribute food in a hypothetical system where people aren’t allowed to profit from its production and distribution?
Mandating the price of bread? “Conservatives” argued that during extreme situations, like the aftermath a hurricane, charging $100 for a bottle of water helps weed out the folks that just aren’t really that thirsty.
I’m not as familiar with the other two, but if you listen to Piker speak in general, he views the US, the idea of businesses seeking a profit, and capitalism as a whole as ontologically evil and equivalent to fascism. In this article, he talks about how when someone is in a large amount of debt, that’s “social murder”.
If you actually believe those things (and I have no idea whether Hasan does or does not, because he certainly seems to do quite well for himself under capitalism by preaching the evils of capitalism) then I can understand wanting that state of affairs to end in any way possible.
It’s just that this is an utterly delusional view of our current society.
I agree that there are systemic issues with the way we handle food distribution (and production); but:
These problems aren’t really being caused by grocery stores themselves, which have very thin margins all things considered. Shoplifting hurts the wrong target.
The problems are serious in some limited aspects, but it’s not like our system is horribly flawed to the point of being irreparable.
We do have systems in place to get government aid to people who cannot afford food. These systems aren’t perfect either, but again, they are not so hopelessly flawed that we should toss them out.
They wouldn’t have to worry about that last step. If their system was better than Walmart, H-E-B, Target, etc., those businesses would either have to adjust to keep up, or they would go out of business in a similar way to Sears, Blockbuster Video, Radio Shack, and so on did.
I agree with your idea for the approach you suggest would be best if major chains were actually grossly overcharging for basic food. The thing is that grocery stores overcharging isn’t the fundamental problem. It’s probably not even in the top 10 or top 20 reasons food prices have been going up. Underpaying workers / cutting their jobs in favor of automatic checkout lines? Sure. Cutting corners on the safety of their big trucks and driver’s hours? Maybe. Overcharging people for a bag of beans or rice? It’s laughable to even think so.
Reminds me of Dr. Oz during his ill-fated Senate campaign, shooting a video in a supermarket and talking about the cost of buying ingredients for crudités. Or Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic.
Such people are insulated from the cost of buying food and other essentials. Markups due to increased shoplifting won’t affect them.
And yes, this is the sort of thing Republicans will gleefully seize on to pretend that Democrats in general support crime.
I agree with thatt wage theft is a problem that should be treated more seriously, but I don’t think that thus kind of discussion is the way to spread awareness of that. None of the discourse I’ve seen generated by this has been about wage theft. The microlooting bullshit completely distracts from that point, and I think for most political “normies” that hear something like this are going to be turned off from listening to these people at all rather than internalizing the subtle point they made about wage theft.
I, also, would not defend micro-looting in any fashion, but I feel this thread is getting lost in the weeds. The through-line on that discussion (as I read it) was about responding to “enshitification” and how aggressively extractive industries are these days. Not only did they discuss micro-looting and when it was moral these days, the talked about about United Healthcare and the murder of its CEO and the destruction of the toilet paper warehouse (or am I mixing up my media feeds?).
I had a discussion about this with my youngest kid (a sophomore in college), and while he assured me that he does not shoplift, he wholeheartedly understands their rationale. Likewise he felt that pirating media, whether music, video, or print, was fair game especially in this day and age where corporations (be they OpenAI, Pinterest, or social media sites like X) routinely steal content from its creators and monetize it.
The conversation also devolved into dynamic pricing and “troll” companies like Ticketmaster and Amazon that do perform a service but are essentially just trolls extracting profit on the bridges where they have set themselves up as the middleman between producers and consumers. These companies purposefully try to use their monopoly power extract huge profits from both sides while really not providing all that much. The same could be said of social media companies. It seems theses days everything has been enshitified.
So while this discussion about shoplifting from Whole Foods or whatever is interesting, I think it would be interesting to talk about where this fad is coming from.
But there are areas where one store has driven out the competition. We may deplore the tactics they used but the situation is there. If we target that store for its unfair practices and our actions have a real effect, then the store might decide to close (or be forced out of business).
And then what? We’ve turned an area with one unfair corporate store into an area with no store. That’s not an improvement for the people who live in that area.
So before we target that store, we need to have a plan in place for what’s going to take its place.
It’s hard to describe the headline of an article as getting lost in the weeds.
Yep, in addition to petty theft, they brought up arson and murder.
If OpenAI and social media sites “stealing” content is bad because it deprives creators of income, how does stealing from content creators yourself help them?
I largely share your intuition. I would push back only on how much weight we should put on such intuitions. I thought normies would recoil at many of the successful political messages of the last ten years. But with our current information environment, it’s very hard to say how any given person will actually encounter this discourse. People are as likely to encounter the original underlying substance as they are some refracted version of it, and which refracted version depends entirely on what part of the media ecosystem they hang out in. I saw this NYT article mentioned first in a reaction Tiktok to a Tiktok about the article (which is itself an excerpt of a podcast?). Then I saw a subreddit discussion of a Bluesky post. Then I saw it here. All with different emphasis and spawning different discussions. It’s a funhouse mirror that each of us shapes through our own decisions about who to follow and our own special algorithm tuned for our idiosyncrasies.
What we can say with some confidence is that reaching people in 2026 requires getting their attention, which has become very hard! You almost have to say something controversial to get into the arena.
Woah; I am sensing a bit of hostility here. I am just trying to continue the debate.
The headline of the article, if I remember correctly, was “The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?” This thread for the most part has been talking about shoplifting food, food deserts, and the costs of theft. Sure, there have a been a few mentions of wage theft and poverty, but I don’t think that we have been talking about the frustration in our society that everything is rigged and stacked against us. To me, this is what the opinion piece was trying to get at.
Yes, they did. Did you hear them think was good? I didn’t. They did think it could be understood because "The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?" Again, I don’t think this opinion piece was about justifying crime and I am sad that that seems to be the only thing you got out of it. The opinion piece, to me at least, was about the frustration of our current society where wage theft (~20 billion / year) is shrugged off, people who commit fraud are pardoned and get to have dinner with the President, insurance companies deny >30% of claims, social media sites steal and monetize content, and companies pollute with the express permission and protection of our government. Examples of this frustration being released include murder, arson, and yes, micro-looting and digital piracy. But the frustration is the point, not these channels being OK.
I don’t think you listened very closely. The podcasters clearly stated that they would pirate the music as they didn’t want to give Spotify a dime, but would happily pay to go to the show or buy their merch to support the artist. Similarly they would not steal from mom and pop or community stores, but had no problem ripping off a company owned by Jeff Bezos.
It’s even more delusional to think that bringing on chaos will improve the state of affairs.
Do you, or does he, think this is something new?
I already brought up Steal This Book in this thread. And this wasn’t new in the 1970’s, either. I doubt it was new when people started telling stories about Robin Hood.
Yes, the exact expressions vary. The underlying problem is the same: societies that come up with a concept of “money” find that people who have managed to accumulate some of it are then in a better position to accumulate more than people who hadn’t; and this is likely to encourage highly unpleasant forms of social inequity. However, “money” is such a useful concept that getting rid of it isn’t going to happen.
Different societies have tried different ways of dealing with this problem. Some of them are a lot worse than others. If any of them have fixed it entirely, I don’t know about it.
Maybe, but if so they are on the wrong track. To use an analogy borrowing from old school D&D, the correct response to a lawful evil system should be to try to make it lawful good, not chaotic evil. If our society is like the Empire from Star Wars, the goal should be to move towards a society like the Federation from Star Trek, not towards Mad Max.
Money is necessary because fundamentally it’s a means of keeping score. Without keeping score, there’s chaos. The likelihood that a fair and just society will arise based on chaos is essentially zero. While lawful doesn’t necessarily mean fair and just, it’s a good place start from.
My recommendation would be a wealth tax administered by a just government, not leaving things to be handled by each individual person. That would just result in chaos.